Word: weightfulness
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Calder’s sketches are simultaneously whimsical and technical. In a study for his work Circus, Calder draws a playful trapeze contraption, with his personal notes on how to create it: “Place lead weight on aluminum shelf, pull white thread, releasing weight, pulling phantom up on black thread.” Seeing the actual manifestation of Circus in the next room adds to the impact. The installation is an amalgamation of miniature circus figures: a lion in a wire cage and its long-limbed trainer in the circus ring, dangling trapeze figures, horses, elephants, camels...
...national convention in Washington. The all-volunteer group, comprising some 11,000 members nationwide, will use the meeting to raise funds, lobby congressional leaders and stage a plus-size fashion show - all in the name of promoting awareness of fat issues. Critics say NAAFA, which opposes dieting and weight-loss surgery, is an apologist for an unhealthy lifestyle. But NAAFA says it does no such thing, that some people are just bigger and no less deserving of the same rights as everyone else. (Read "First Comes Love, Then Comes Obesity...
...more procurable “Green Card” craze brought many Indians (including my own parents) overseas for greater opportunity—suitors for marriage then labeled “export-quality” spouses. Today, even in a country whose growth outstrips America’s, the weight of Western ideas is ever growing, even as American immigration borders are drawn tighter. Is this attempt at emulating Western culture indicative of mistaken perceptions—perceptions that characterize Indians as desperately in need of a culture other than their...
...understand how orangutans swing, it helps to compare them to their primate cousins, the chimpanzees. Chimpanzees pull their bodies close to the tree branch as they move, but being relatively small, they can do that without worrying about the vibrations caused by their own body weight. If orangutans behaved that way, the vibrations would build dangerously, as they do on a suspension bridge...
...orangutans' unique locomotion also helps them reduce the time and energy needed to climb. The more flexible a tree branch is, the more it will bend under an animal's weight. "That means they can lose height, and gaining height again is costly because you have to oppose gravity," points out Thorpe. When an orangutan leaps from a flexible branch it also loses motion energy - think of jumping off a pile of sand versus one of asphalt - and when they land on a flexible branch, they have to wait for the vibrations to stop before they can jump again, which...